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THE SQUARE

The Square

Ruben Östlund

Drama • 2017 • 2h 25m

Reviewed by Beatrice 23. June 2023

YOU HAVE NOTHING: a neon sign on a wall of the X Royal Museum

A video installation of a monkey man watching you

Another noisy installation of vertically tangled chairs that look like they're about to fall over

Small piles of concrete on the floor spread out in order: no photographing!

Art is watching us

The square is the new installation to be inaugurated: a square bordered by LED lights.

" the square is a sanctuary of trust and altruism within whose boundaries we all have the same rights and duties to others."

Christian the museum curator, has to organize the opening of the work of Lola Rias, an Argentinian artist, as best he can, so he undergoes interviews through which he explains that the biggest challenge is money; innovative art has costs, and in one afternoon you put in everything you spend in a year.

Ambarrassed by the request for a site description in which he speaks of "exhibition-not-exhibition and site-not-site," he "gets away" with the trite definition of ready-made: a mirror-climbing!

Recoming to work, there is someone on the street, insistently asking, "do you want to save a human life?" but everyone is busy going their way indifferently.

A woman comes screaming, someone is chasing her and wants to kill her: Christian together with another passerby, protects her, although he is surprised and frightened by the crazy situation that has arisen.

After a few minutes, the curator realizes that he has been robbed of his cell phone and wallet, from here an escalation of events reveal the true face of an individual when faced with the unexpected and responsibility.

Two marketing experts are involved in the project for the debut of the installation as there is a need for communication that ties in with the news because the artistic message is a bit generic and not very catchy.

The choice will be for a video of a small beggar woman walking across The square with a surprising ending that will go viral on the net...

But Chistian is too busy tracking down possible robbers located through his cell phone in a 15-story tenement building to deal with the choice of marketing consultants: he therefore writes a letter to be delivered to all the building's residents threatening their return.

While variations of Schubert's Ave Maria are the symbolic musical refrain of the film, it is necessary to imagine being in a square, the square, an area that must be filled with SENSO, it is necessary to watch over each other while everyone is obliged to help each other.

It is not enough, you have to choose which side you are on: I mistrust people or I trust people and if you are a trust you have to leave your cell phone and wallet in the square.

An 'infinity of unforgettable scenes, full of tension, cynical humor and chilling, accompany a narrative through a recurrence of well-defined topoi with which to trace in a micro-surgical way the nefariousness of a murky humanity.

An existential parable of which Rodrigo Pla's "The Zone," and the districts of Andrew Niccol's "In Time" had been the preamble.

But here the square, the agora or rather the 4x4 square are the enclosure of the privileges of Western welfare that masquerades as false ethics through the guise of altruism and the hypocrisy of hospitality.

Imbarrassing is the interview scene in the presence of a bystander suffering from Tourette's syndrome; even more disturbing is the intimacy scene in which we witness the dispute over the condom used.

among the recurring topoi of the narrative, there is no shortage of the theme of almsgiving: the emblem of the space of falsification, the real deception.

But the gala dinner is the key to the interpretation: while all elegant people are seated at the sumptuously laid tables, the program calls for the monkey man to enter, the one of the observant installation; a voiceover welcomes the jungle, urging caution and not to show fear, because only if one remains in the herd will no one notice the presence of the other: the production of an artificial bystander and...

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